Mar 20, 2012

His Name is Mudd

Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth and whose shame created the expression, "His name is Mudd." 

He was sentenced to life in prison for splinting the fractured leg, but became a hero to guards and inmates of his island prison when he stopped a yellow-fever epidemic there in 1868 after the army doctors had died. President Johnson, Lincoln's successor, pardoned Mudd in early 1869.